City officials at the Hunters Point South construction site on Wednesday.

A team led by the Related Companies was picked to construct two towers in the first phase of Hunters Point South, here in a rendering.

By CHARLES V. BAGLI
February 9, 2011

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The Bloomberg administration announced Wednesday that it had selected a team led by the Related Companies to construct the first phase of a development on the Queens waterfront that will be the largest middle-income complex built in the city since the 1970s.

Related and its partners — Phipps Houses, the largest nonprofit operator of affordable housing in the city, and Monadnock Construction, one of the largest builders of affordable housing — will erect two towers at what is called Hunters Point South, with 908 rental apartments, at least 685 of which will be set aside for working- and middle-class families earning $32,000 to $130,000 a year.

Hunters Point South is a signature project of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s housing and waterfront development policies. The entire 5,000-unit complex, which was first announced by the mayor more than four years ago, will offer subsidized housing for an unusually broad swath of working- and middle-class families. The city has invested heavily in the site, buying this once industrial stretch of waterfront, where Newtown Creek enters the East River, for $100 million.

The city is also spending about $175 million on a toxic cleanup of the site, a 10-acre park, roads and water and sewer lines. It is also bestowing $50 million in grants to subsidize the affordable units in the first two buildings. A school is scheduled to open in 2013.

“At Hunters Point South,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement, “not only will we build the largest affordable housing complex in more than three decades, we’ll do it on a long-vacant waterfront property that has incredible views and sits adjacent to one of New York City’s fastest growing neighborhoods.”

The project has been a long time coming. Years ago, as part of its ultimately unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics, the Bloomberg administration wanted to use the land to build housing for athletes; after the Olympics, the housing would have been turned into apartments. At the time, some officials in Queens feared that it would become a slum.

But as developers and investors began buying up large blocks of housing for poor and working-class families, raising fears that rents would quickly rise, Mr. Bloomberg announced plans in 2006 to build affordable housing at the waterfront site.

Stephen M. Ross, chief executive of the Related Companies, at first hoped to persuade the Real Estate Board of New York, the powerful lobbying arm of the real estate industry, to build the housing on a nonprofit basis. But Mr. Ross, who then headed the board, had trouble persuading his fellow developers to take on the project, and the city was reluctant to turn the entire site over to a single entity.

“This is something I believe in passionately,” Mr. Ross said. “To succeed and prosper, the city has to build workforce housing. It can’t be the most expensive city to live and work in. But there haven’t been any middle-income housing programs for the past 20 years.”

Rival developers complained privately that the city would favor Mr. Ross because of his close ties to the Bloomberg administration. City officials went to great lengths to explain why the Related team was chosen.

Rafael E. Cestero, the city’s housing commissioner, said that the Related-Phipps-Monadnock team had submitted the lowest-cost bid and adhered most closely to the city’s design guidelines. Indeed, it was the only one, he said, that offered to build all the apartments for poor, working- and middle-class families. The city will be subsidizing only 75 percent of the project because of financial constraints on its part, Mr. Cestero said.

“I’m disappointed,” said K. Thomas Elghanayan, chairman of TF Cornerstone, a finalist in the competition. “But Related is a very competent firm.”

The Related proposal is a victory of sorts for the city, which was hoping for at least 60 percent of the units to be affordable. The city plans to begin building the water and sewer lines next month, along with 5 acres of the planned 10-acre park.

Construction of the two apartment buildings will not begin until June 2012 and will take about two years to complete. The rest of Hunters Point South will not be completed until after Mr. Bloomberg leaves office.

The nine towers would be narrow and rectangular and would range in height from 260 feet (26 stories) to 400 feet (40 stories). Two of the nine towers would be permitted to rise to that maximum height. The new buildings would be residential, with retail and community facilities at the base.

The tall towers on Sites A and B would also be clearly visible in the distance in views up Manhattan Avenue from the commercial hub of Greenpoint. These towers would join the Queens West towers already present in that view corridor and would not block any important visual resources beyond. Overall, therefore, the proposed actions would not adversely affect any visual resources visible from the Brooklyn portion of the study area.

From Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, new buildings at Site A and Site B would contribute to the creation of a new Queens skyline, which together with Queens West to the north would appear as a prominent collection of towers and lower buildings. This new skyline would be similar to what is anticipated immediately to the south along the Greenpoint waterfront in
Brooklyn as a result of the recent rezoning there.

Public libraries across the country are cutting employees and closing facilities, but the one that serves the borough of Queens, New York, is taking an opposite tack: It’s planning to open one of its largest branches to date, and it’s hired architect Steven Holl to design it.

The city announced in July that it had chosen Holl to design the 20,000-square-foot facility, which will sit by the East River, across from the United Nations complex. The $21 million project, which is set to open in 2013, will break ground next summer. A schematic design will be unveiled in November.

The Hunters Point neighborhood, where the library will be built, has undergone a major transformation since the 1990s. The former rail-yard now features a half-dozen residential high-rises, plus a public school and parkland. Four new apartment towers, a second school, and more parks are planned for a nearby parcel.

The library is expected to offer shelving for 85,000 books and DVDs, as well as a performance space and offices. It also will have slightly more room for community meetings than other facilities do, up from 75 seats to possibly 100, says Peter Magnani, a library director. Also on the site will be an information kiosk for Gantry Plaza State Park, located next door.

“This is a really important building for us from a public-relations perspective,” since it will be visible from so many high-traffic roads, like the FDR Drive and the Queensboro Bridge, Magnani says. “The message it will send is that our library is a beacon of knowledge.”

The Hunters Point library, which will be the 63rd in Queens, will serve a borough that seems to take reading seriously. With 23 million items loaned a year, the library system is, its officials say, the busiest in America. (In New York, the Queens Library operates separately from the New York Public Library, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, and the Brooklyn Public Library, which covers Brooklyn.)

Holl, who is based in New York, has designed a smattering of projects there, like the Higgins Hall Center, a glass-walled 22,500-square-foot wing completed in 2005 that connects two architecture school buildings at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute.

More recently, the firm designed the Campbell Sports Center for Columbia University, where Holl is a tenured architecture professor. The planned five-story, 48,000-square-foot complex, which will abut Baker Field where Columbia’s football team plays, is to feature offices, and auditorium and a hospitality space, though its design is a work in progress.

The Queens library would be Holl’s first public project. Because funding will come from public sources, the firm’s selection was made by a city agency, the Department of Design and Construction, which picked Holl from among a short list of eight candidates. Those pre-screened candidates participate in the agency’s six-year-old Design and Construction Excellence program, which encourages creative public-works projects.

For architect Chris McVoy, senior partner at Steven Holl Architects, New York’s decision to boost library service while similar institutions reduce it speaks to a larger point: The Internet may not be as detrimental to physical texts as first thought. “A decade ago people were predicting the death of books,” he adds, “and we have found the opposite to be the case.”

Queens Library at Hunters Point: A model of this new branch, designed by Steven Holl and Chris McVoy.

A rendering of the Hunters Point library in Queens as seen from East 42nd Street in Manhattan.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
January 30, 2011

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There may be no better example of the worrying state of American architecture than the career of Steven Holl.

At 63, this New York architect is widely considered one of the most original talents of his era. His work has influenced a generation of architects and students. And over the last decade or so he has become a star in faraway places like Scandinavia and China, where he is celebrated as someone able to imbue even the most colossal urban projects with lyricism.

Yet his career at home has been negligible. He has had only a handful of notable commissions in the United States, and his output in New York is embarrassingly slight: a modest addition to Pratt Institute’s school of architecture, a cramped (if underrated) gallery at the edge of Little Italy and a handful of interior renovations.

So when the Queens Library Board of Trustees approved the design of the new Hunters Point community library this month, it was a well-deserved and long overdue breakthrough. The project, done in collaboration with Mr. Holl’s partner Chris McVoy and scheduled to begin construction early next year, will stand on a prominent waterfront site just across the East River from the United Nations. It is a striking expression of the continuing effort to shake the dust off of the city’s aging libraries and recast them as lively communal hubs, and should go far in bolstering the civic image of Queens.

The building’s beguiling appearance — with giant free-form windows carved out of an 80-foot-tall rectangular facade of rough aluminum — should make it an instantly recognizable landmark. Seen from Manhattan, it will have a haunting presence on the waterfront, flanked by the red neon Pepsi-Cola sign to the north and the remnants of an abandoned ferry terminal to the south. At dusk the library’s odd-shaped windows will emit an eerie glow, looking a bit like ghosts trapped inside a machine. And late at night, when the building is dark, spotlights will illuminate its pockmarked facade and the windows will resemble caves dug into the wall of a cliff.

Only at the site itself, however, will the optimism driving Mr. Holl’s design come into focus. The library will stand at the western edge of Queens West, a soulless mix of generic apartment towers and barren streets built up in the last decade or so that has neither the dilapidated charm of the old manufacturing neighborhoods to the east nor the density of a real urban neighborhood. (The development’s one saving grace is a narrow park that snakes along the riverfront; its steel gantries, once used for loading boats, are an ode to the area’s industrial past.)

Mr. Holl ’s design is not about escaping this world but transforming it into something more poetic. Approaching from the towers across the street, visitors will enter a tranquil reading garden, a little paradise walled off from the gloomy scene that surrounds it. Ginkgo trees will shade the garden, partly blocking the view of the towers. As visitors move closer to the library, they will be able to see through the lobby windows and out over a reflecting pool and the riverfront park. Other odd-shaped windows will allow diagonal glimpses up through the building and out to the sky.

When I first saw a rendering of this facade it brought to mind Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 “Day’s End,” in which Matta-Clark used a power saw to carve big circular openings into the exterior of an abandoned industrial building on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan. In both works the overscaled cut-out openings are powerfully metaphorical. They suggest the desire to expose private, interior worlds to public scrutiny, and — by seeming to undermine the buildings’ structural stability — they evoke an unstable, ever-changing world.

But Mr. Holl’s design is also a statement about the individual’s place in a larger communal framework. The lobby is a towering space framed on both sides by several big, balconylike reading rooms. To get to them visitors climb a staircase that runs up the lobby’s back wall and past one of the huge free-form windows that afford views of the East River and Manhattan. The stairs lead first to the main reading room, which overlooks the lobby, then cross back to a children’s area or continue up to another reading room for teenagers. Eventually they emerge onto a rooftop terrace, where during nice weather people will be able to attend lectures and performances, or , when nothing is going on, lounge around and enjoy the spectacular view.

The strength of this layout is that it allows Mr. Holl to balance the reader’s need for solitude with a strong sense of community. The main reading room, cantilevering out over the lobby, is the most open. The children’s reading room, the noisiest, is enclosed behind a curved wall with a few small windows cut into it so that kids can look across to the adults or up to the teenagers.

But it is the constant reminders of the larger world provided by the giant cuts through the building’s surface that give the design so much resonance. Mr. Holl is not interested in creating a monastic sanctuary; he wants to build a monument to civic engagement. The views aren’t just pretty; they remind us that the intellectual exchange of a library is part of a bigger collective enterprise. It’s a lovely idea, and touching in its old-fashioned optimism.

The first phase of Hunter’s Point will transform a total of more than 800,000 square feet of vacant waterfront land bounded by 50th Avenue to the north, 2nd Street to the east, Borden Avenue to the south and Center Boulevard to the west.

Infrastructure work, including the installation of sewers, watermains, roadways, sidewalks and parking, will begin next month and is expected to be completed during the Spring of 2013. Park construction will begin this summer. The two residential buildings, including the retail space, will begin construction in 2012 and are expected to take up to 24 months to complete. The new school, which will be built by the New York City Schools Construction Authority, will open in the Fall of 2013.

Designed by SHoP Architects, with Ismael Leyva Architects, the team’s plan for the initial two residential mixed-use buildings features classic tripartite building composition in a modern, façade design. The development plan calls for the creation of vibrant retail corridors along 50th Avenue as well as Second Street, which will ultimately serve as a spine that connects all of Hunters Point South. Generous sidewalks, multiple street level entries, and facade treatments that anchor the buildings to the streets, will all work together to create an active, new neighborhood.

...“We applaud the Bloomberg administration’s vision for transforming a long vacant parcel into a burgeoning waterfront community,” said Related Companies Executive Vice President Bruce A. Beal, Jr. “Related Companies has a forty-year commitment to the creation and preservation of affordable housing and a track record in executing large-scale developments and we are thrilled to have been selected along with our partners Phipps Houses and Monadnock Construction to develop the first phase of Hunter’s Point South, New York’s next great middle income community. The availability of housing opportunities for all of our city’s working families is critical to New York’s future and we are proud to be playing a role in creating a dynamic, sustainable neighborhood at Hunter’s Point South.”

“Mayor Bloomberg’s administration has demonstrated tremendous leadership with their plan for Hunter's Point South,” said Monadnock Construction President Nick Lembo. “We are looking forward to rolling up our sleeves to work with our partners, Related Companies and Phipps Houses, to build affordable housing for hard-working New Yorkers.”

its really amazing how much Queens is doing right now,i feel like it came out of nowhere. i have to say im extremely excited to see that NY's other water fronts are finally being looked after after so many years and im sure it will continue with even Brooklyn getting a few more all towers. great stuff cant wait to see it all get done.

__________________New York City,The City That Never Sleeps,The Capitol Of The World,The Big Apple,The Empire City,The Melting Pot,The Metropolis,Gotham

Large scale housing developments like this are what the City needs more of. What's great is that it's not just luxury housing. I think New Yorkers need to be reminded every now and then that the City can do great things, especially in this time of cuts on everything and costs going up.

The tall towers on Sites A and B would also be clearly visible in the distance in views up Manhattan Avenue from the commercial hub of Greenpoint. These towers would join the Queens West towers already present in that view corridor and would not block any important visual resources beyond. Overall, therefore, the proposed actions would not adversely affect any visual resources visible from the Brooklyn portion of the study area.

Great to see more developments overlooking Manhattan like this one. But my fear is that this will become a Nimby magnet and that progress will be impeded.

There's going to be fewer concerns with this project because there is little to nothing else around the site, save for rail yards and other condos. The reason there is so much objection to anything built in Manhattan is because there are so many [rich] people living there. Besides there are a slew of developments for the community in this project. The biggest and frankly most reasonable issue IMO is the issue of transportation. The 7 Train's gonna get real full if you know what I mean, and its one of the issues preventing the Domino Sugar Factory conversion from moving forward.

my fear is that this will become a Nimby magnet and that progress will be impeded.

It's a city development, and there aren't many NIMBYs around to fight it. But even if there were, the basic NIMBY concerns are covered: affordable housing? Check. New school? Check. Open and Park space? Check.

The first phase (the two towers shown) should be completed in 2014, with work on the actual buildings beginning next year. Site prep began last year.

But even if there were, the basic NIMBY concerns are covered: affordable housing? Check. New school? Check. Open and Park space? Check.

True, but it seems that they always find a reason. But you guys are probably right, its not a concern in this particular development.

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Originally Posted by patriotizzy

Is anyone actually excited for that library? I don't find it attractive one bit.

I personally am not a fan of that kind of architecture. Im always happy to hear a new large library opening (cause library's will be an endangered species sometime in the future), but if i were them i would clad it differently, not just have flat concrete.